MIGUEL KING’S JOURNEY: FROM ADDICTION TO REDEMPTION

By Frederick A. Hurst

As Miguel King spoke to his mother on the phone, begging her to come and get him or send him money, he heard his sister in the background deriding him for not having the courage to stop his bad drug habit. 

       She had good reason to doubt him.  He was calling from the Salvation Army Rehabilitation Center on Columbus Avenue in Springfield where he supposedly had gone to seek help kicking his addiction.  He had been taking drugs nonstop for the past thirty plus years and his sister had never seen it get better, only worse.  That he was begging to leave the rehabilitation center only hours after he arrived confirmed his sister’s suspicions that rehabilitation was not foremost on Miguel’s mind.

       What was on his mind, he now freely admits, was another scheme to get money to buy more drugs.  And he saw the Salvation Army as a final vehicle to secure a monthly government SSI (Supplemental Security Income) check.  He had been living in an abandoned building on Sergeant Street in Hartford, Connecticut, eating in soup kitchens and shelters and sleeping on the floor with other addicts.  But by the time he left for the Salvation Army, he was alone.  It was a cold winter that made for many uncomfortable nights in a house with no heat or electricity.  He kept from freezing by keeping his dog, a large, untrained Rottweiler, lying down beside him. 

       Life hadn’t always been so miserable, but his condition went from bad to worse and hit rock bottom when he had a heart attack.  Miguel woke up in Saint Francis hospital with tubes and needles projecting from his body.  He was born with a heart murmur and every time he smoked crack he noticed his heart would skip beats.  His mind was on getting high and it never occurred to him that the drugs in combination with the heart condition might be killing him. 

       He had been an athlete, a neighborhood hero who ran track, played semi-pro football and tried out for two National Football League teams.  He had attended college, worked several good jobs, and married a wonderful woman with whom he had a daughter.  All the glory was in the distant past but for Miguel, the pleasant memories still masked his current reality.  But when he had the heart attack, he came face to face with his own mortality, and it made him reflect, for a short while anyway, on how his addiction had ruined his life.

       When Miguel left the hospital, he moved into an apartment that his mother found for him.  She paid the security deposit and the first month's rent.  But what little money he came by went to feed his persistent addiction and he couldn’t continue to pay the rent.  He lost the apartment and life became as unmanageable as it had become before his heart attack.  So, for the first time, he decided to go to a detoxification center where a social worker convinced him to join a Salvation Army program.

       The Salvation Army pastor picked him and others up in Hartford in the Salvation Army van and headed down interstate 91 to Springfield.  The pastor began explaining that the program was a work-therapy program with a spiritual content.  Miguel recoiled at the thought.  He knew the Salvation Army for its used clothes and furniture and had not expected a sophisticated rehabilitation operation that would require effort.  He bluntly told the pastor, “Man, I’m trying to get SSI, not work therapy.”

       Miguel moved tentatively from the van to the Salvation Army facility that he now viewed with suspicion.  He came to “get over” and they meant business and he wasn’t interested.  A friend, who had preceded him into the program, reaffirmed to him that discipline and spirituality were at the heart of the program not SSI and getting back to Hartford became Miguel’s prime concern. 

       Miguel was called into the upstairs office where the pastor asked him what he intended to do.  When he restated his SSI expectations, the pastor made it clear to him, in no uncertain terms, that his expectations would not be met and that he was in the wrong program.  He gave Miguel six dollars for bus fare and sent him on his way.   He didn’t even give him a ride to the bus station, which was about 2 miles down the road.

       Miguel left the building, walked to the first phone he could find, called his mother and begged her to come to pick him up.  She refused and told him to sit and “rest his nerves” and think about it some more.  It was then that he heard his sister's humiliating and unsympathetic taunts in the background.

       Miguel panicked.  A light snow had developed into a full scale blizzard and it occurred to him that he was in a predicament and had nowhere to go.  At that precise moment in time, Miguel made the best decision of his life.  Reluctantly, he walked back to the Salvation Army, up the flight of stairs to the office on the second floor, and fell on his knees before the man he had just recently scorned, and, with tears streaming down his face, begged for help.

       Nothing came easy.  Pastor Patrick Scott, the counselor who Miguel feared and later came to consider as his best friend, was strict.  He assigned Miguel to work in the kitchen but not before explaining the rules.  If you deviated from them, you were out of the program.  Not three or two deviations, but one deviation and you were gone.  It was precisely the type of tough love that Miguel needed most. 

       And, so, Miguel began combating his addiction.  “It doesn’t stop,” he said. “You are vulnerable at any point in time.  A lot of us in our addiction have been out there so long, we don’t know how to get back.  But as days went by, it got easier and easier and, finally, it occurred to me that I was beginning to like the new lifestyle.  I had clothes, a roof over my head and food, a small salary and plenty of time to think about whether to change or go back to drugs.  The Salvation Army gave me a new life, a new beginning and I had to give it a chance.”

       One of the hardest things Miguel had to do was to give up his quest for SSI.  “SSI,” he explained, “is a drug addict’s heaven.  Everybody (on drugs) is getting on SSI.  Combine the $300 dollar check and food stamps, which they turn into money, with the woman’s public check and food stamps and you have a pretty large combined income.”  The money, he said, is rarely used for the basic essentials of life.  It is used for drugs.  And the irony of the government subsidizing illegal drug usage and sales did not get by Miguel or this writer.

       Miguel had been on a Hartford welfare program for three years before his arrival.  But he was waiting for a transfer to SSI, which seemed imminent.  It was his future drug lifeline.  He had to have a disability to qualify for it so he had grossly exaggerated his old ankle injury and it seemed to have worked.  “Welfare is like a bad habit and it took me a while to accept that I had to let that check go,” he said.  But with a simple question, Miguel’s Salvation Army counselor gave him a stark decision to make, “Do you want money or recovery?”  Miguel chose recovery and never looked back.

       Miguel was born in 1952 and raised in Hartford by two hardworking parents with four siblings, two girls and two boys.  He attended Hartford schools and by the time he graduated from Hartford Public High in 1971, he had made a name for himself as a track star.  He worked as a machinist for a year at Pratt and Whitney and then enrolled in Mattatuck Community College where an observant football coach recruited him for the football team. 

       After 2 ½  years, Miguel transferred to Clark College in Atlanta, Georgia but soon became homesick.  His old girlfriend had just had his first daughter and he wanted to be near her.  He made a brash and near fatal decision to return home from where he planned to try out for the National Football League (NFL).  He went to NFL training camp as a free agent for the Jets and the Eagles but did not make the cuts.  So, he returned to Hartford and played semi-pro football for two years with the Hartford Crusaders until he broke his ankle.  The ankle never healed properly and Miguel was out of the game forever.

       He had been experimenting with marijuana since he was 18.  He thought he could run marijuana out of his system.  He now realizes that it interfered with his performance and may well have cost him the edge needed to play in the NFL.  Marijuana was not strong enough to ease the pain that Miguel felt at losing his football career.  He started sniffing cocaine and quickly graduated to sniffing in such volume, he said, that he “could pull a handkerchief through (his) nostrils.” 

       While he perfected his drug habit, Miguel returned to Pratt and Whitney, where he worked for five years.  He was beginning to worry about the toll drugs were taking on him.  In 1982, he married a military woman five years his junior.  She traveled and he left his job and traveled with her hoping to outrun his addiction.  He calls it “looking for an easy way out.”  They ended up in Alexandria, Virginia, where the “beast” followed him.  It was a government town but he couldn’t get government work because he couldn’t stop taking drugs and, therefore, couldn’t pass the mandatory drug tests. 

       Meanwhile, his marriage was crumbling.  He ignored his wife’s advice to get help for his addiction.  He still fantasized that he remained in control.  Finally, in late 1987, her military duty over, his wife maneuvered them back to Connecticut where, in early1989, she left him for good.  He kept their only daughter for two weeks before realizing that the drugs made him a bad parent, and he sent her back to be raised by her mother.

       Life in Hartford was still dignified for Miguel.  He was a “working addict.”  He could keep a job.  He just couldn’t keep his money.  Upon returning, he got a job that allowed him to develop a side hustle that netted him up to $500 a night.  He built himself a network of cadres who helped him acquire non-drug products that were in high demand in the community.  His rooming house, where he had moved after his wife put him out, was stacked with goods.  He fenced the hot products for money and spent the money on partying and drugs.  He even had “crack heads” working for him. 

       His products’ source and his job eventually dried up as did the flow of big money.  Miguel stopped paying his rent again and was again evicted from his rooming house.  He found another room in the home of a landlord who was also hooked on drugs.  The house eventually turned into a crack den with all the markings of human degradation.  Miguel still harbors memories of “looking at desperate addicts with no money crawling on the filthy floors looking for 'rocks' (of crack cocaine) to smoke to get a free high that would last no more than 10 to 15 minutes.  That’s a scary feeling,” he said.

       The landlord eventually lost the house and the bank boarded it up.  Miguel and others removed some of the boards and moved in.  “The place was jumping for a while,” Miguel explained, and he sort of managed it.  He would allow young guys in “to break up their coke.”  They affectionately called him OG (Old Gentleman).  He was their advisor and they liked him and kept him high.  

       He had always managed to look good and to hide outward appearances of his addiction.  He especially hid it from his mother.  But, one day, she caught him smoking crack at her house and cried.  His behavior was in stark contrast to his older brother who had become a doctor and she could not understand what had happened to her favorite son, Miguel.  Miguel simply left without saying anything.  “The worst thing you can do is mess up an addict’s high,” he explained.

       But things were beginning to close in on Miguel.  The young addicts started influencing him.  He even started wearing their baggy style pants and running the streets with them.  And he also found himself being chased by the cops, who were working hard to break up the drug gangs.  One day in 1995, when they were running from the cops, Miguel fell and was caught.  Fortunately the cop who caught him was an old school friend.  He let Miguel go and warned him to leave the area and never return. 

       So, Miguel shunned the crowd and started getting high on his own.  He said, “I never thought I would ever stop using.  I thought I was going to die. The year I lost my father I was so high off drugs I couldn’t cry.”  Alone now, short of cash, cold and feeling like less than a man because his daughter’s birthday was coming up and he couldn’t afford a gift because he had spent all of his money on drugs, Miguel put his untrained and unmanageable Rottweiler to sleep at the animal shelter and headed for the detoxification center that eventually directed him to the Salvation Army. 

       And, within six months after joining the Salvation Army, he became Resident Manager and after about six more months, he became Case Manager for 2½ years.  He knew after three months that he would succeed.  His skin color improved dramatically, his weight was returning to his old athlete days and he was feeling good about himself.  He was enjoying afternoon bible study and Wednesday night church and his dignity was slowly being restored.

       From the time he joined the program in 1996 to 2002, he never once regressed, but he still hadn’t been “tested.”  He was constantly reminded by his counselor and others that he had not been tested because he was still living in the Salvation Army.  They told him that it was his time to move on and demonstrate to himself the ability to live and work on his own without taking illegal drugs. 

       He was “scared and nervous” but he decided to move into an apartment on Chestnut Street in Springfield.  Still wise to the ways of the streets, he immediately recognized that drugs were being sold outside his apartment block.  Soon, every night when he returned from work to his apartment, he ran into the same drug dealer who kept offering to sell him drugs.  Miguel stopped the efforts by telling the dealer that, “if you ever try to sell me drugs again, I’m gonna drop a dime (tell) on you,” and the dealer never bothered him again. Miguel passed the test, and after two years he moved to Chicopee to “get away from the area.” 

       And, ever since leaving the Salvation Army, Miguel has been gainfully employed.  He was first hired by the Mental Health Association as an outreach counselor working with the homeless and substance abusers.  He later went to work as an HIV Case Manager for AHEC (Area Health Education Center) in Hartford where he is at present. 

       And he gives all the credit to God—credit for the warning heart attack in that cold abandoned house, credit for getting him to the hospital on time and into that detox program where he learned about the Salvation Army Rehabilitation program.  And he gives God credit for sending that blizzard that made him go back up to that second floor office and beg Pastor Scott for help and for giving him the strength to stick with the program and the courage to finally wean himself off of it into a new life of independence without drugs. 

       “Spirituality and recovery,” he declares, “go hand in hand.”

       While at the Salvation Army, Miguel joined the choir and they performed at many Salvation Army functions.  Miguel came up with the idea to form a gospel group.  They started with about nine members but narrowed down to three including Miguel, Lonnie Bowens and Zeke Johnson.  They later added Miguel’s good friend, John Wilson.  Miguel suggested two names for the group, “As One” and “Second Chance.”  The group adopted “Second Chance” and has become a much sought after gospel group with many recordings.  Every member of the group had a major drug addiction, fought it and has never returned to drugs.

       But Miguel couldn’t grow with the group.  He had another small heart attack and also became preoccupied with a person with whom he expected to spend some years.  To fulfill his spiritual needs and his love of gospel, he joined Progressive Community Chapel and sings in its choir while attending as many Second Chance concerts as he can.

       Miguel has been “clean” going on 10 years.  He stays in contact with his two daughters.  But, his most pleasant memory about his rehabilitation is summed up in his own words: “The greatest gift I could have ever given to my mom before she died 5 years ago was to see her son clean and sober for 5 years.” 

       And the greatest gift that Miguel has given to his own community is to have rehabilitated himself, gone on to help others and to tell his story so that young people can understand the perils of drugs and the possibilities for redemption. n